Vaccines & Viruses: California vaccine bill not immune to changes

Bare essentials. The authors of a controversial California vaccine bill eliminating religious and philosophical exemptions for students are downscaling the legislation in hopes of easing its passage through the state Senate. Sens. Richard Pan and Ben Allen nixed a provision requiring schools to report their vaccine rates to parents and will essentially grandfather currently unvaccinated students into the bill. Unvaccinated elementary students wouldn’t have to get vaccines until seventh grade, and unvaccinated seventh-graders might not have to get shots at all. But new kindergarteners would need to be vaccinated or show proof of a legitimate medical exemption. The pro-life organization Children of God for Life last week sent a letter to California lawmakers defending the religious exemption after Pan and Allen expressed a degree of ignorance about the use of aborted fetal cell lines in some vaccines.

Don’t be late. Meanwhile in Arizona, where parents can claim religious and personal belief exemptions from school vaccine requirements, hundreds of schools are not enforcing the law, according to The Arizona Republic. Schools are supposed to send home unvaccinated students who don’t have exemption forms, but apparently some administrators don’t enforce the requirement. The state’s health department reports 41 percent of Arizona kindergarteners are attending classes in which measles vaccination rates are below the “herd immunity” level.

Bill battles. Maine is in line to be the next battleground state in efforts to remove philosophical vaccine exemptions. Vermont lawmakers planned to vote on such a measure Tuesday. One year after stricter exemption laws went into effect in Oregon, health officials there say kindergarten vaccine exemptions have dropped 17 percent.

Vaccine views. A new NPR poll shows people are less likely to support vaccine mandates if they have children of their own. Eighty-three percent of parents support mandated vaccines for schoolchildren, compared with 89 percent of adults without children. Thirty-eight percent of parents are in favor of allowing exemptions based on personal or religious belief.

Measles vaccine benefits. Researchers in the journal Science say the measles vaccine has another benefit besides preventing measles: It lowers the risk of illness or death from other pathogens contracted subsequent to a measles infection. When a child catches measles, it weakens his or her immune system for about 28 months, raising the risk of illnesses like pneumonia, sepsis, bronchitis, and diarrhea. Kids immunized against measles also are protected against this window of “immune amnesia.”

Deadly reactions. Mexico suspended its infant vaccine program after an apparent batch of bad vaccines killed two babies and sickened 29 others in a poor community in the southern state of Chiapas. It’s not yet clear exactly what caused the reactions.

Anti-vaccine stigma. The president of the Vaccine Injured Petitioners Bar Association says it’s “incredibly difficult” to get medical experts to testify in cases involving vaccine injuries. Even though the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program compensates families for what seem to be real vaccine injuries, many doctors allegedly won’t get involved with injury claims because they worry they’ll be associated with the anti-vaccine movement.

Parasite protection. Scientists have created a vaccine that protects mice from Chagas disease, a serious illness caused by a parasite common in Latin America. Their goal is to develop such a vaccine for humans, for whom no Chagas vaccine yet exists. The disease is transmitted to humans by bugs and affects 6 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization.

German measles no more. International health officials announced late last month that rubella—also called German measles—has been eradicated from the Americas, at least for now. They credited the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine.